Product Life Cycle Essay

2. What stage of the product lifecycle describes this product? Which of the four main marketing strategies apply here?

Product Lifecycle is a good method to identify the formulation of marketing strategy. Product lifecycle has 4 stages: Introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Sony PlayStation 4 was released on 15 November 2013 in North America and Sony claims that they successfully sold 1 million units of PlayStation 4 on their first launching day. They double the amount of sales compare to PS3 sales on the first month as illustrated in Figure 1. Furthermore, Sony has to exercise heavy promotion to create awareness on PlayStation 4 because it is a new product. Hence, Sony PlayStation 4 is in the introduction stage. Sony PlayStation 4 is considered as a gaming console and they must regularly update and refresh their product, price, promotion and place strategy to compete within the industry.

The main marketing strategies that apply in this stage are the Product, promotion and price strategies. Product strategies at this stage expressed the PlayStation 4 specifications broadly and its features benefits on why it is better than the other gaming consoles. Sony shows the product qualities that attract their targeted customer market interest, the hardcore gamers. The hardcore gamers demands their games to be visually appealing with superior quality and Sony PlayStation 4 shows that they are capable of doing that. Also at this stage, Sony gives the customer ability to provide insight on the product so they can improve and can perform better than its competitor. This strategy will be discussed further in point 4.

Sony uses various pricing strategies to gain consumer interest in the introduction stage. Odd pricing is exercised by ...

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...ved a better brand loyalty, 93% of PlayStation 3 owners said they are interested to purchase a PlayStation 4 over an Xbox One (7%).

Demographic segmentation is based on factors such as age and gender. The Entertainment Software Association (2013) reported that 51% of US household own a dedicated game console. Gender demographic is 55% male and 45% female. Also, according to the same resource, the average age of a gamer in 2013 is 30 years old, consisting of 32% under 18 years old, 32% 18-35 years old and 36% above 36 years old. However, not every gamer in this survey is considered as a core gamer. The composition of hardcore gamers are more towards the younger demographic. NPD group (2013) survey reveals that those ages 9-17 are most likely to be a hardcore gamer (26%), while ages 18-35 are slightly lower at 21% and the percentage starts to drop down from here.